Can you afford to deploy new applications in days or weeks when your competitors can do it in minutes? Are your developers satisfied with the time it takes to move a new application from development through QA and CA to production? Are you able to deploy new releases daily? Are you happy that your development teams prefer public cloud services over internal IT? If you've answered NO to at least one of the questions, it's high time to put Software-Defined Data Center near the top of your priority list.
Now imagine you'd combine virtualized network services with programmable network elements? You'd get highly flexible infrastructure allowing you to deploy, configure and migrate application stacks in minutes, not days or weeks.
This section illustrates the concepts of Software Defined Data Centers (SDDC) with a real-life example using VMware NSX/VSAN and Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform and describes the following concepts:
In the Overlay Virtual Networking section you'll discover the architecture and technical details of numerous overlay virtual networking solutions including:
The section covers these deep-dive topics (including detailed packet flows): * Layer-2 MAC address learning and flooding in overlay virtual networks; * Connecting overlay networks with the physical world using layer-2 gateways, layer-3 gateways, and virtual and physical appliances; * Distributed layer-3 forwarding; * Layer-3 overlay virtual networks.
After a brief refresher of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) concepts, this section focuses on typical virtual network services use cases, benefits and drawbacks of virtual appliances (as compared to their physical counterparts), performance limitations of virtual appliances, and deployment and management challenges in large-scale environments.
Firewalls inserted between VM Ethernet adapters and virtual switches can drastically change the typical security paradigms, and introduce centrally managed scale-out architectures.
This section describes the common VM NIC firewall architectures (including Cisco???s VSG, VMware NSX and Hyper-V-based solutions) as well as service insertion and virtual network tapping solutions.
Ivan Pepelnjak, CCIE#1354 Emeritus, has been designing and implementing large-scale service provider and enterprise networks as well as teaching and writing books about advanced technologies since 1990. He’s the author of several Cisco Press books, prolific blogger and writer, occasional consultant, and creator of a series of highly successful webinars.